Of Ram and Sriram

It is a fact of life that your firstname may not be unique in an organisation of a hundred plus people. Things get tricky when even your 'firstname lastname' combination is not unique (or unique enough). My friend and colleague Ram is actually Sriram Narayanan. It differs from my full name by just an extra 'an' the end. We generally receive each other's emails (and money sometimes) and have learnt to live with it. Then someone started talking to me about my writings on Solaris! This post is to clarify matters a bit. The picture on the right is me.

Ram joined ThoughtWorks a little later than I did and he was kind enough to refer to himself by a shorter version of his real firstname. Ram blogs at http://dynamicproxy.livejournal.com

Usability rant: I wish *enterprise* email clients could pop up mug-shots of individuals when helping with name completion. Enough said.

imagine the problem people in China might be facing. Apparently, there are about only 100 surnames that the entire nation shares. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/13/wnames113.xml